A friend of mine once made it several episodes into the first season of Smallville before adorably asking, “So, is he like teenage Superman?” She had somehow just thought it was a show about an alien living among us in Smallville, Kansas. The fact that there was a nearby town named Metropolis which was mostly run by a man with the last name Luthor whose bald son, Lex, was milling around Smallville with best new bud Clark Kent did not immediately cry out to her, “Yes, this is teenage Superman!”
Never thought “Oh, that’s Lex Luthor,” but instead, “What a nice bald fella”
On the other hand, I think it would possible to get through the first season of Arrow without realizing it was a TV show about Green Arrow. For one thing, Green Arrow is simply nowhere near as well known a character as Superman. For another, Arrow didn’t originally feel like a comic book show. It felt like Christopher Nolan’s masterfully grounded Batman Begins, just as a TV show. Similar to Begins, it was only near the end of Arrow‘s first season when the main bad guy’s evil plan was revealed that you could openly question, “Wait a minute, that sounds exactly like the kind of thing a comic book villain would do!” It’s not like Arrow was high art, but it certainly wasn’t Smallville camp either.
Season 2, howoever, feels as if comic book characters have been walking on screen straight off the page, ala characters in an A-Ha video (Bronze Tiger, Clock King, Isabel Rochev, Amanda Waller, Black Canary, Barry “Flash” Allen, Roy “Speedy” Harper, Slade “Deathstroke” Wilson). Plus, people have superpowers now. Granted, they’re limited in scope, but Roy got shot through the hand last week only for it to heal almost instantly. This approach risks losing the more casual fans for whom something like a surprise cameo from Harley Quinn (in a recent episodes) means absolutely nothing. Plus, it’s simply a show with more characters than it has the requisite screen time for which has led to a lot of lazy writing in service of cramming everything in. It’s not that Arrow is no longer enjoyable; it’s just a very different show now than it used to be, as they try to go bigger, better, and way more DC.
So, it’s for all of these reasons that I completely fell for ScreenRant’s April Fool’s Day joke this morning. Running an article titled “Arrow Producers Tease Season 3 Details, Possible Justice League Episode” they purported to have quotes from an interview the producers gave to The Wrap. Nothing fishy so far. Arrow‘s producers rival Vampire Diaries‘ for being the chattiest of Kathy’s among current showrunners. Then the quotes seemed to indicate that someone might die at the end of the season, which we’ve all been predicting as the show has become increasingly overcrowded:
Berlanti: Well, with a villain as big as Slade Wilson/Deathstroke, he’s not going to just go down without landing a few hard hits of his own. Even if Oliver ultimately wins the day, could it possibly happen without some kind of sacrifice? That’s the question.
Guggenheim: In our show it’s not even really a question: somebody’s going to be feeling the pain; the piper has always got to get paid. But what’s the price and who pays the tab? That’s the question that will hopefully be baiting the hook up through the finale.
Enjoy the view while you can. It’s been widely speculated Sara won’t survive the current season.
They then indicated that season 3 might mark the beginning of a new era of the show absent any island flashbacks, although not necessarily the end of the flashbacks altogether:
Berlanti: Well, the interesting thing about this season is that it kind of closes off the story of Oliver Queen and his time on the island. In a weird way seasons 1 – 2 are really just one big story arc split up over two seasons; but we’re quickly getting to the end point of that story. After that, the challenge is figuring out who Oliver wants to be now that the past is behind him. He’s finally going to know who “Green Arrow” is.
Sure, the producers have long since maintained they went into Arrow with a 5-year plan for how things would shake out on the island, a plan we now know included the return of Sara Lance as well as a truly random pirate/research ship. However, while the split narrative quality of the show was initially effective and still has its defenders the longer it has gone on the more improbable it has become, with Oliver gaining his own traveling party and constantly encountering not just new characters but also situation after situation which always seem to echo something happening to him in the present. They’ve almost become like far more focused Family Guy cutaway gags, if instead of staring off into the distance Oliver would set up his flashbacks with a quick, “Wow, this is just like that one time on the island…” So, even though this supposed quote from Guggenheim didn’t seem real it was easy to hope it was.
ScreenRant then claimed that even though DC clearly intends to do a Justice League movie they might let Arrow do their own kind of Justice League thing on the show. Sure, that wouldn’t ultimately make sense for DC, but it probably doesn’t make sense to waste one of their biggest characters like The Flash on a TV show instead of a big budget film either:
Guggenheim: We’re talking with the writers and making plans right now, but essentially we think we’ve fully earned our way into the ‘Age of Heroes’ for this TV universe. Oliver is a full-fledged Green Arrow, he’s hanging with Black Canary – Barry Allen will be doing the Flash thing over in his show… The masks are on now, and all that’s left is to bring some of these vigilantes together to achieve some greater purpose.
Here’s where ScreenRant got greedy. They had Guggenheim saying of their Justice League roster ”let’s just say that some of them you’ve never seen on TV before – and others you have, but maybe just not for a while” as precursor to suggesting that perhaps he was referring to Tom Welling’s Superman.
Tom Welling as he looks post-Smallville, from the upcoming film Draft Day
Go shut the front door! There’s no way in heck that DC would let Arrow do their own version of Superman while they have Henry Cavill around playing the character on the big screen. Sure, they did exactly that when they had both the Tom Welling and Brandon Routh Clark Kents around at the same time Superman Returns/Smallville, but what Marvel Studios did with their shared cinematic universe in The Avengers has forever changed the rules in that area. Yet here was ScreenCrush pointing to some Deadline report detailing Tom Welling meeting with Warner Bros.-TV to discuss both on-screen and behind-the-screen (he wants to direct!) projects. So, they made the leap to suggest maybe he was meeting about Arrow.
He’s not. There is no Deadline report nor is there any kind of recent interview with Arrow’s producers on The Wrap. It was all an April Fool’s Day joke. I immediately knew the Tom Welling part of it was either complete bullshit or mere lazy rumor-mongering on ScreenRant’s part. However, honestly, Arrow has become so DC-crazy this season that I’d totally buy them wanting to form some sort of Arrow version of a Justice League comprised of Green Arrow, Black Canary, Speedy, The Flash, and probably new additions like The Question, Nightwing, and Ted Kord. I’ve already assumed that was their goal. Smallville eventually reached that point. Think of your notable DC characters, take away Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and all of the Batman-related ones, and everyone left over probably showed up on Smallville before the end of its run. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, necessarily. It’s just that Arrow has already struggled with managing its current roster – could it survive actually growing larger?
Impulse, Green Arrow, Superman, Aquaman, Cyborg
So, I totally fell for ScreenRant’s joke. Maybe it speaks to what has become of Arrow that I fell for it. More accurately, it’s truly just laziness on my part to not completely question what I was reading in ScreenRant’s article. However, I’ve sort of given up questioning the directions Arrow‘s producers take the show because otherwise if I read about it beforehand-both Sara, who’s an assassin with a lesbian lover, and Malcolm, who’s Thea’s real dad, are still alive, Laurel will spend half the season as a drunk/pill-popper due to grief over Tommy, Slade will declare a blood vendetta against Oliver based almost entirely on that one time Shado was nice to him, etc.-I’d likely assume a lot of it was just an April Fool’s Day joke.
Source: ScreenRant
